Happy Birthday!: And Other Stories (11 page)

~

Genevive was nineteen when her college boyfriend Vikram got her pregnant. She didn't tell anyone except Bhanu, because she bravely thought that no one would find out; she would have an abortion. But it was a futile proposition, for what could they do? They didn't know any other pregnant girls, the doctors they knew were acquainted with their families, and it was illegal to walk into a clinic and ask for an abortion. Worse still, neither of them had any money.

It was Bhanu who came up with an idea; an idea so bold for her that she blushed thinking about it even now. Her brother had written a dissertation on the sex trade for his Sociology major, and Bhanu remembered him saying that the sex workers he encountered had unwanted pregnancies, for which they didn't have the money to go to a clinic. Surely, Genevive and she could go to Kamathipura, where her brother used to go for his research, and ask one of the sex workers for help.

A week later—after much deliberation—the two girls, under the pretext of attending a college function, took a bus to Grant Road. Too embarrassed to get off at the actual stop, they walked to Falkland Road. There was still light outside when they reached and no women plied the streets, so they walked around aimlessly, holding each other's hands, starting at any noise in the unexpected silence. Finally, they passed a dilapidated one-storey building with peeling paint, outside which sat a middleaged prostitute wearing a blouse and petticoat, gajra in her hair.

They went up to her. The woman scowled at them, her leg up on a stool, breaking suparis with a nutcracker. The girls hesitantly told her their problem.

‘What the hell should I do about that?' she asked gruffly.

Bhanu's reply stopped in her throat, but Genevive answered, ‘Maybe you can give us the name of a cheap doctor?' Her voice was laced with fear.

‘Don't know any,' the woman said, and tossed three suparis into her mouth.

‘Please, I have nowhere else to go,' Genevive said.

Moving her paan-stained lips in slow deliberation, the woman leered at the girls, her eyes hovering over their breasts, as if assessing how much they'd be worth in the market. Bhanu crossed her arms over her chest, while Genevive stared brazenly back at the woman.

‘How much money you have?' she finally asked.

The girls looked at each other.

‘I have six hundred rupees,' Genevive said humbly. She'd been stealing money from her mother's purse over the last few weeks to pay for her abortion.

‘Not enough,' said the woman.

‘I have three hundred more,' Bhanu said. ‘And some change.'

‘Where did you get the money from?' Genevive asked her.

‘It's the money I was saving to buy a guitar.'

Genevive squeezed Bhanu's hand in gratitude.

They emptied their purses and gave the prostitute all their money. The woman shoved the notes into her lowcut blouse, next to a threadlike gold chain, and said, ‘Wait here.' She got up and disappeared into the building.

Genevive and Bhanu ducked behind a thin wall to avoid being seen, and waited. Thirty minutes passed, then an hour. They came out from their hiding place and looked around the road, not daring to talk to one another. Women were stepping out, dressed in flimsy saris, garish rouge, fake moles and big red bindis already smudged by the humidity. Men passed by on motorcycles and in cars, staring and honking at the two girls. The last of the sun's rays began to disappear.

A man with a mass of hair on his knuckles stopped his car in front of Genevive, rolled down his window and asked, ‘You, how much for one hour?'

‘That's it,' Genevive shouted. ‘I'm going upstairs.'

‘Are you crazy? You don't know what kind of people are in there,' Bhanu said, frightened.

‘I don't care,' Genevive said. ‘She's taken all our money and disappeared. And it's my fault. I should've asked her name and followed her inside. Now I'll never get rid of this baby and you'll never get your guitar.'

Genevive stormed into the building and started climbing the stairs. ‘Stop!' Bhanu said, and used all her weight to pull Genevive back. Just then, the prostitute came walking down the stairs. She was dressed up luridly, with a silver paranda coiled around her large head and body glitter gleaming from the fat rolls beneath her arms.

‘Oof! I'd forgotten about you,' she said on seeing them. ‘Now which one of you is pregnant?' Before they could reply, she looked at Genevive and added, ‘You're the pretty one, so it must be you.'

Bhanu didn't know what came over her, but she said, ‘Me. It's me.'

‘Here,' the woman said, pulling out a yellow plastic bag from her blouse that contained a few white pills. ‘Have two right now, and one every hour after that, till they're all finished.'

Bhanu extended her hand, but Genevive yelled, ‘These look like headache pills. You can't cheat us like this!'

In a huff, the prostitute threw the pills on the floor and walked off.

Bhanu ran after the woman, ‘What will these do?'

‘What you want them to do,' the woman replied. ‘Just don't sit down once you've taken them.'

Genevive came running behind Bhanu and shouted, ‘Give us back our money or I'll report you to the police.'

The prostitute hopped into a car and was gone.

Genevive and Bhanu went back home, disheartened and unable to do anything for a few days. Then, Genevive vomited on three consecutive mornings and her mother asked if she'd been bringing her boyfriend home. So, the next day, while Carla was at work and Bhanu's family was taking a siesta, Genevive—following the prostitute's cryptic instructions—swallowed two pills.

Nothing happened for an hour. Genevive took another pill. She kept standing, pacing Bhanu's bedroom, becoming increasingly irritable.

‘I'm exhausted and I don't think this is going to work. We've been cheated,' she said, walking towards a chair.

‘Don't sit down!' Bhanu said.

Genevive opened her mouth to say something and suddenly keeled over, clenching her stomach. ‘I'm getting really bad cramps.'

Bhanu held Genevive's hand.

The bleeding started after the second hour, and Bhanu took her to the bathroom. Then she ran frantically around the house, finding old cotton sheets, newspapers, kitchen cloths and sanitary pads to give to Genevive, praying that no one from her family would ask what the girls were doing.

After another hour, Genevive leaned over the edge of the toilet seat and said, ‘I can't take this any more.'

She was turning white.

‘Genevive!' Bhanu said. ‘What's happening?'

‘My entire stomach is falling out,' Genevive whimpered, her face flushed and sweating.

It was the baby.

~

Genevive puts her hand on Bhanu's.

‘You haven't forgiven me,' she says, as if a balloon has been deflated.

‘For what?'

‘For everything I've put you through. Kamathipura, my drinking, my mother and then my husband.'

‘There's nothing to forgive.'

‘And your abortion? Do you still blame me for that?' Genevive asks softly.

Had Bhanu done the right thing by taking someone like Genevive into confidence with regard to the life of a child? She didn't know then, and she doesn't know now.

But in the patients' room, surrounded by a doctor and sterilized equipment, it was Genevive who had held Bhanu's hand as her uterus was emptied. Bhanu was convinced that the positive CVS test had left her with no choice. So she lied to everyone, including Mohan, saying that the test had led to the miscarriage of her unborn son. As Mohan went about bringing her khichdi and holding her hurt body through the night, she couldn't look him in the eye, wondering if he would've approved of her decision. Would anyone have?

At that time, Bhanu had little strength to dwell on these thoughts. She was so consumed by the pain, starting with the pins and needles in her breasts. Her body didn't understand that its milk wasn't needed as it spilled down her stomach and legs, through her clothes.
My breasts are crying
, she thought.
They're suffering for my sins
. She began wearing a T-shirt and cardigan over her salwar-kameez, even to bed, hoping the milk wouldn't soak through for anyone to notice. Then she ate, and how she ate, feeding the emptiness left by the son she could've had, the son in whose memory she still ate for two.

Bhanu couldn't sleep in Mohan's bed after that. She moved back to her parents' home, saying she needed her mother, that it was temporary. Her family grew worried—even her cousins, who hadn't spoken to her since their house was split into half, came to visit her. She saw them all, but when Genevive came to visit, Bhanu couldn't bear to look at her. The mere sight of her face reminded Bhanu of the terrible mistake she had made. She told her family to send her away.

In less than eleven months, at a time when Bhanu could have been playing with her son, but instead was still hurting, still in mourning, still spending most of her time in her parents' house, Genevive came to her room: ‘Shardabai said you were sleeping but I had to see you. I have something important to tell you. I am pregnant; four months pregnant.'

~

From deep in Genevive's chest comes a growling sound.

She pulls out a handkerchief that Carla had crocheted for her, a token of her mother that she says she'll keep till her dying breath. ‘Bhanu, you know that I take equal responsibility for letting you go through with the abortion. I wouldn't have let you if I'd known any better. You know that, right?'

Bhanu throws aside her blanket that suddenly feels unbearably hot.

‘You should have stopped me,' she whispers fiercely. ‘I couldn't think straight at that time, but you should have thought for the both of us. Like I always do for you.'

‘I know,' Genevive says, tears rising in her eyes. ‘I should have and I am sorry that I didn't. I tried to explain so many times afterwards, to apologize, but you wouldn't let me near you. You don't know how deeply sorry I am.'

‘Why didn't you stop me?'

‘Oh, Bhanu. I didn't know, how could I know then that you wouldn't be able to conceive again?' Genevive cries. ‘And I had no idea that CVS is a diagnostic test; it isn't always completely accurate. That it could have been a false positive. That you could have taken the risk and had a healthy baby.'

‘And what if it wasn't a false positive, Genevive? What if my son was born with Down's Syndrome or something else?' Bhanu says, her voice startlingly loud. ‘Would you be sitting here apologizing to me about that as well?'

Her life cannot slip from perfection to imperfection based on this one single decision.

‘If your son were here, even with special needs, we would have arranged to look after him, joined a support group, or even started one. We had a choice.'

‘Choice? The way you had a choice when you killed your unborn child.'

‘Bhanu! It isn't the same thing. I was a kid.'

‘You had a choice, and you chose the coward's way,' Bhanu says, her face hot and wet with emotion.

Genevive sees this and says softly, ‘You are comparing things that can't be compared, Bhanu. I understand your anger, believe me I do. There are so many things that I still have to explain to you. The last few months, they've been tough on me.'

‘Tough on you?' Bhanu can't help but snort.

Genevive says nothing. For the first time in a long time Bhanu studies her friend, noting that Genevive has acquired the thin, intense look of the unlucky. Her arms are mottled with the round bruises of injection needles. Her body bears the gaunt look of being subjected to pills and transducers. It must not be an easy pregnancy.

They finally look similar, her once beautiful friend and her.

‘Perhaps you are not ready to hear my side of the story yet,' Genevive says. ‘But I can't leave without asking: Will you be able to raise my baby?'

Her tear-rimmed eyes are swimming with hope.

Bhanu answers slowly, ‘No, Genevive. I will not. I am sorry.'

It feels as though she is finally shutting the door to an ill-willed storm.

Before either of them can say another word, there is a knock on the door, and Dr Hussain, Bhanu's gynaecologist, enters the room. He is a little man with a generous beard, a craggy jaw, and hair that grows all the way up to his neck.

‘Hi Bhanu,' he says cheerfully. ‘It's good to see that you're up today.'

He then sees Genevive and the blood drains from his face.

‘Genevive?' he says. ‘What are you doing here? You're supposed to be on bed rest.'

‘Dr Hussain!' Genevive says, standing up. ‘I was just …'

The doctor walks up to Genevive and places a hand on her shoulder. ‘No excuses, my dear. Go home and lie down. Promise? I will come by your house after this visit.'

Bhanu looks with surprise from Genevive to the doctor. She sees how tenderly he is gazing at her, as if genuinely concerned about her well-being. And Genevive, Genevive is blushing!

‘I'll come back later,' Genevive mumbles to the floor, and speeds out of the room.

Dr Hussain walks up to Bhanu's bedside, as she stares at him. He is a pleasant person, studious and mild. Not Genevive's type at all. But earlier in their conversation, Genevive had said something about a doctor. How can the doctor be involved with Genevive? Is it possible that he is … the father? No, Bhanu thinks, for Dr Hussain is married with two sons. But who can put anything past anyone nowadays? Especially with Genevive. A married doctor is better than all the men she's been with before.

She will ask him, Bhanu decides.

‘So …' Dr Hussain says. ‘I didn't know the two of you knew each other.'

‘We're childhood friends,' Bhanu says flatly.

‘Oh, I see.' He sits down on the chair where Genevive had been sitting, leans over and says sympathetically, ‘You have been crying. I guess Genevive told you about the baby and the whole situation.'